Many integrated circuits (ICs) use a driving frequency which is provided by a resonator device. The resonator device has typically been a quartz oscillator. However, quartz oscillators typically have a high area consumption, limited options for integration of the quartz onto an IC chip, and limited accessible frequency range (e.g., the higher the frequency, the more expensive the quartz solution gets). Recently, another solution has been generated, which is referred to as a silicon oscillator or silicon clock. The silicon oscillator technology is based on the oscillation of silicon bulk material under the influence of an electrical field with a frequency that is defined by the geometry of the silicon resonator. Silicon oscillators are typically manufactured on silicon wafers using semiconductor technologies.
Silicon oscillator chips are packaged in order to form a component that can be assembled onto a substrate. However, standard packaging procedures, such as those that use a cap wafer, typically enlarge the size of the component significantly so that the small-size advantage of the silicon oscillator technology is lost.